Audio guide stop for Moyra Davey (photography)

MOYRA DAVEY: This first piece is a grid of photographs that were folded and mailed to a friend in Paris.

NARRATOR: Artist Moyra Davey.

MOYRA DAVEY: The photographs were taken from a book that Mary Wollstonecraft published in 1796 called Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. And they're just close ups of the word "letter" over and over again.

NARRATOR: Davey has exhibited photographs since the early 1980s. It was only in 2007 that she started mailing them.

MOYRA DAVEY: You know up until then, I had always treated my photographs very carefully. Everything had to be clean and perfect. I discovered this business of folding a photograph and writing on it and putting it through mail, making a piece of mail art out of it, essentially, was something that was hugely pleasurable and a big departure from my twenty-, or thirty-year practice of making photographs, mounting them, framing them, handling them with white gloves, and so on.

It's a very social, very social process. The idea of addressing something to a friend or a relative, and knowing that they were going to open it and have the experience of seeing this photograph. I get feedback from people.

NARRATOR: To hear about Davey’s other photo work, please tap the screen.